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A SENSE OF TIME (MP3)entrada
A SENSE OF TIME
LANGUAGE IS NOT the only mental faculty that separates human beings from other animals. A sense of time also divides us from other vertebrates and even other primates. David Premack, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that all vertebrates have a "weak sense" of time intervals, being able to discriminate, for example, between sounds lasting for five and ten seconds. Some can distinguish between "a long time ago" and "just now." Chimpanzees even display some consciousness of past and future and are able to indicate by symbols when they are "about to" perform a task. Nevertheless, Premack contends, no other members of the animal kingdom are aware of time the way humans are.
Premack says that the difference in time-consciousness between chimps and humans is not just quantitative, a matter of holding long spans of time in memory. Primates other than humans cannot, for instance, "recollect" what being a child at home was like, nor can they compare feelings they experienced in their youth with their current emotional state.
"I don't think it is possible to speak on the human sense of time without including in it the ability to represent yourself to yourself," Premack says. "If we think of the concepts that are presupposed by a sense of our own mortality, one of those concepts would certainly be knowledge of time in the full, human meaning of the word. It is very likely that in all the animal kingdom we are alone in that knowledge."
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The
House
excerpted from If You Do Love Old Men
by Virginia Stem Owens
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THE HOUSE (MP3)
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O
heavens,
If
you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow
obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make
it your cause; send down, and take my part!
--King Lear, II, iv
Time,
like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears
all its sons away.
--Isaac Watts
I LIVE ON A HILL in a house he built almost forty years ago. The hill will be here long after the house is gone. Both of us know this and take our own kind of comfort in it. The hill has been cleared on three sides for pasture, so that it catches the south breeze in hot weather, which is what we most have in East Texas. But there's still enough oak, sweet-gum, hickory, cedar, and pine trees left on the hilltop to shade the house in summer. Along the fence line grow blackberry brambles and a little plum thicket where mockingbirds start singing right before daybreak.
Originally there was a log cabin on the hill. I don't know how old it was, but I remember it had a cistern and a handpump in the kitchen and that it was pungent with rot when he started the new house. That was in 1952. He made it out of yellow pine he hauled from the sawmill over in San Jacinto County. The house is important because it gathers into one solid human artifact the times, the changes, the decay and loss, in the same way the mind holds memory. And how the human heart bears loss and memory is what this story is all about.
He was almost sixty years old when he started this house, and it wasn't the last one he built either. He liked building more than any of the other jobs he ever had. I used to hang around and watch him work. I liked the turpentine tang of the pale pine shuttling through his hands as the laid the lumber across the sawhorses to measure and mark it with his thick, flat carpenter's pencil. I liked listening to his handsaw sing its rasping two notes--zee-zing, high-low--and his hammer whang the nails home, each blow a descending note on a metallic, vibrating scale. I liked hearing him whistle his working songs, "Strawberry Roan" and "My Mother Was a Lady," between his teeth.
He was happy when he was building, not only because he liked the work but because he was his own boss then. He always worked as an independent carpenter, doing all the jobs himself or else with only the help of a few hired men, usually down-on-their-luck relatives or neighbors. He did it all, from foundation to roof. Most of the time, though, people hired him to do small projects--putting in stairs or adding on a room.
I remember my grandfather building the north wing of this house. Since his family had no place else to live, he dismantled the old log cabin a section at a time as he built a part of the new house in its place.
I stayed with him the spring the new house was built. His youngest daughter and I were both twelve years old that spring, our last year to be children. We would race one another across the bare floor joists before the decking went down. The foundation of the house was pier-and-beam, which used to be the common way of building houses in this part of the country because it raised the floor high enough off the ground to allow air to circulate freely underneath. As Sally and I picked our way across the elevated spans, the ground seemed dangerously far below. We had to calculate our stride and rhythm accurately or we'd fall between the joists.
But in that unaccountable way of hills and housed, either the house has sunk or the hill has grown, and with it the girls. The northeast corner now sits right down on the ground, and termites have digested a good part of it. As for my grandfather, his vision is poor and the strength has gone out of his hands. His fingers are so twisted now, he couldn't hammer a nail straight. I see him almost every day, but I haven't heard him whistle his old songs in a long time. And Sally says she can't remember that spring at all.
======================
HE NEVER drew up a plan for the house before he started building, unless it was a rough pencil sketch on the back of a page torn from the Goolsby Drugstore calendar that always hung beside the kitchen stove. He was not by any stretch of the imagination an old-world craftsman. His carpentry was always from the hip-pocket, catch-as-catch-can, make-do school. He learned it from his father and older brothers on the farm and perfected it during the Depression when he has a large family of his own to shelter. Necessity determined his style. He always built with verve rather than exactitude, and he never had any feeling for finishing work. To him, a ten-penny nail looked as good on the inside as the outside. To do him justice, however, my mother says he once built her and her sister fine rocking chairs, the parts carefully fitted and finished. Nevertheless, what he liked best was seeing a building go up, taking shape. Then he was eager to move on to the next thing.
He built this house in the shape of a T, with all the rooms opening directly into one another and with no hallways--a design called "shotgun" in this part of the country, meaning that you could stand at one end of the house and shoot straight through all the doors right out the other end. Hallways are a waste of space, he's always said. Also, except for the one room where the leg and the arms of the T join, all the rooms have their own doors to the outside. He's always liked to keep an escape route handy.
The rooms are all exactly the same size. Every window is set square in the center of the wall, the way a child draws a house. All the rooms are just alike. There is no discernible reason why one should be a bedroom and another a dining room. The house is a triumph of form over function. Function was never consulted at all. Nor was his wife.
Along the inside edge of the T facing north and west runs a long, covered porch, built some years after the house itself. It has served mainly as a place to stand and watch the rain. In the summer the afternoon sun makes the porch too hot, and in the winter there is nothing to shield it from the north winds. My grandfather's youngest son, still a boy when the porch was added, wrote the date in the soft cement the day the porch slab was poured: "Aug. 29, 1955."
There is a crack running across the north leg of the porch now, caused by the soft, sandy soil under the slab settling over the years. And the son, the one who wrote the date with his finger, has himself settled into the sandy soil in the cemetery in town. He died not much more than a year after he had written that date in the wet cement. He was a young recruit in the Army Medical Corps and was killed when his ambulance went over a cliff in Germany. After the funeral the family sat around in the dining room, hot even in November. I lay on an extra bed set up by a window and cried with my face to the wall. This was the first house touched by death I had ever known. That he was so young, only a few years older that Sally and I, made his death seem to belong to us more than to the older people. I didn't see how they could sit at the table and eat. I wanted to be by myself and cry. But there was never any place to go in this house to be alone. Privacy, at least indoors and among his own children, was something else my grandfather never understood. If you wanted privacy, you went outdoors, into the woods.
The house came down to me through a series of happy defaults. My grandfather, as he always did, eventually moved on and built another house. All my grandfather's children, and their children, wanted the house to stay in the family. All of us had spent at least a part of our summer vacations here. My cousins and I had hunted Easter eggs all over the hill, picked dewberries along the fence rows, popped firecrackers at Christmas and Fourth-of-July celebrations there, sneaked off to the neighbor's muddy pond, killed snakes and hung them belly up across the barbed wire to make it rain, learned to shoot a rifle. On holidays and at funerals, a dozen or more children moved like a guerilla band among the grownups, who were too busy visiting with one another to be bothered with us.
Everyone, as I say, wanted to keep the place in the family. My parents actually bought it. But no one could afford to live out in the country in an old frame house. They all had livings to make in the city. So for a number of years the house was rented out, but after a while it began to need too many repairs to make it worth the trouble and expense.
Meanwhile, for years and from far away, I had daydreamed about coming back to this house, of sitting at the kitchen window, one that faces the south pasture, and of writing at the table there. And finally, just as it was getting to be too much trouble to maintain the house, I was able to do just that.
At first my husband and I patched and propped, trying to staunch the wounds inflicted on the house by time and termites. But the kitchen floor listed so badly that the window facings had pulled away from the walls, leaving cracks filled with cottony spiders' nests. Damp and cold seeped through the cracks in winter, and mildew crept up the walls in summer. We tore up the kitchen floor to see if the foundation could be leveled, only to discover that the sills were too rotten to salvage.
So we decided to amputate the east arm of the T and to build in its place a new two-story structure attached to the old house at the shoulder socket where the east arm had been. We did the demolition ourselves, and though it was hard, sweaty work, we took a strange delight in the destruction, as if it were the fulfillment of a secret childhood longing. Children are often excited by the prospect of a flood, for instance. They lie on their backs looking up at the ceiling and imagining what it would be like if the house were turned upside down. I think it's because they want to discover how contexts crack, what would happen if.
The contractor gave us helpful instructions. "Just do it backwards from building a house, " he told us. "Whatever is what you'd put up last, pull that down first."
I imagine my grandfather still thinks of it as his house, at least the part of the old T that remains. He was proud of it when he built it, though by today's standard it wouldn't pass anybody's codes. It has no subfloor, no insulation. This was not unusual, of course, forty years ago in Texas when butane gas was cheaper than fiberglass. He had lived in many "single-wall" houses in his day, the interior studs left exposed. To build a double-wall house had been progress enough for him then.
"These old houses were built like boxcars," the contractor said before we started. "Solid wood and full-size lumber. They don't even mill lumber like that anymore. Back then a two-by-four was really two inches wide and four inches deep. A hurricane wouldn't move this house."
He was right. The outer walls were hard to bring down. The shiplap siding was only easy to pull loose where it had rotted. Termites had eaten clear up between the studs on the south side. Then ants had come and driven out the termites, caking red mud mounds into the spaces between the studs. Yet even in that riddled state, the walls resisted. In the end, we gave up trying to save much of the lumber and just heaved the walls over whole.
It was June, and the moisture blowing in off the Gulf made the dust and dirt stick to us in a damp coating. By noon our clothes were soaked through with sweat. We would stand in the shade of the hickory tree at the highest point on the hill, letting the breeze dry our damp shirts and skin. We felt peaceful and satisfied. When you're building, you're anxious about dong the job right, but when you're tearing down, you don't have those worries.
After we brought the walls down, the bathtub sat on the exposed plain of the floor with the shower pipes still attached, looking like a small boat with it's sail furled, on a wooden platform sea. The contractor hauled the tub away for a house trough. The floor came up last and easily. The foundation sills, what hadn't already crumbled, we burnt. They were full of termites and rot. It was like burning contaminated clothing.
Finally there was nothing left but the bare dirt. After the sun had shone on it for a couple of days, the musty smell of decay and roaches evaporated. We felt good about it, the way your tongue feels when it searches out the spot where the aching tooth used to be. I wasn't sorry it was gone.
The contractor sprayed the ground with chlordane before he set up his forms for the foundation. I wanted another context for this new structure, a solid slab of concrete for the foundation instead of pier-and-beam. Something termites don't eat.
======================
WHEN HE BUILT the old house in 1952, most of the materials used in this new structure did not even exist. Wood, local yellow pine, and nails were what the old house was mostly made of. Very little of the new part is wood. The walls, other than the studs, are silver-papered insulation board. The outside is covered with vinyl siding made to look like three-inch lapped boards painted yellow. On the inside, the walls are textured and painted sheetrock. Sandwiched in between the vinyl and gypsum is pink stuffing make from spun fiberglass. The new windows have thermal panes and aluminum casings. There are no wooden facings around them for spiders to hide behind. On the floors upstairs we laid nylon carpeting; downstairs we put vinyl tiles. Even the pipes are make of vinyl. Only the skeleton of the new house--the framing, the rafters, the decking--is made of wood.
I didn't bring my grandfather here to see the new structure going up. It wouldn't have fit his context. He doesn't believe in houses that aren't make of wood. Just like he doesn't believe in insulation, air conditioning, or central heat. He's barely reconciled to indoor plumbing. He wouldn't have known what to make of a house built out of processed chemicals: vinyl, aluminum, fiberglass, nylon.
I feel uneasy about the fake woodgrain siding myself. I miss the good full-size lumber and the resinous smell of pine and the oil-based paints he used. But this is the fetid forest of the Gulf Coast, where the Karankaway Indians used to smear themselves with alligator grease to keep from being sucked dry by mosquitoes. In these pine thickets of East Texas, you have to hack out a place to live on a narrow, unstable srand between growth and decay. What's not rotting under your feet is threatening to choke you with its rank propagation.
Now that I've make my way back here, I've built my own house in my own way. But I've kept a good part of his too, though others have advised me to tear it completely down. I have hopes that the world will out last what's left of his house. But in a sense, the world, the age, the aeon in which it was built has already disappeared. No one builds houses without insulation and central heat anymore.
And more has changed about the world that just the way we build houses.
======================
He used to consider his children his wealth, just as his own father had. During the years when we still got together on this hill every summer for family reunions, for Christmas, for funerals, he took comfort in spreading them out before him like a fan of cards and looking at them as if he held a royal flush. They would sustain him, he thought then, the rest of his life. They would be grateful. They would honor his hard work, the fact that he'd kept them all together through lean and bitter years. They would stay close to him forever.
But at some paint the rules of the game changed. The hand he had intended to play disintegrated. It didn't turn out to be worth as much as he had counted on. His children scattered across the country. His wife died. He is left now with, at best, three of a kind, and whoever he's playing with holds all the aces.
He will be ninety-one this year--if he lives to December 28, which at this point he gives every indication of doing. His sight and hearing are failing, and he shuffles along, bent over like a question mark. By the time he makes it across the room, he's run out of breath. But his voice is still strong and his health is good--"considering," as his children always add.
"Considering what?" I want to ask them.
At the same time, they can't help wondering why he bothers. Of course, they don't come right out and say this. What they say is, "I sure don't want to live to be ninety, not if it means being in that shape." And that's not all they're considering either.
Seeing him like this puts a strain on their nerves. When they come to visit he's never the way they remember seeing him last. What they would call his personality (though that word wouldn't be in his vocabulary) has been disintegrating and dissolving over the past few years, like an organism that can no longer keep its cell walls intact. Like a house riddled with termites and rot. The unspoken question that shuttles back and forth between them over the telephone lines is "How much longer?"
He lives about a half a mile down the red clay road from me in another house he only supervised the building of. A narrow fallow field where he once grew watermelons lies between my parents' house and his. My mother has had all the trees and brush that had grown up over the years cleared out so she can see when his light comes on in the morning and when it goes off at night. She takes care of all his chores other than the little bit of cooking and washing up he does, and my father does all his repairs and drives him to town just about every day. He takes a fall every month or so, but his hip never breaks, and the papery skin that peels back from his arm like yellowed translucent vellum heals almost as fast as mine can. Three of his brothers lived past ninety, all of them, just as he is, slowly evaporating out of their skins. So his children factor the genetic odds into their calculations and ask again, "How much longer?"
======================
THERE'S ANOTHER REASON I came back here to live in this house. I'd been doing some calculations of my own, and at middle age, I'd caught onto the fact that I'm not going to live forever myself. I began to collect those little booklets about aging--the kind that give you statistics for how many old people there are in America and estimates of how that tribe will increase during the next fifty years. I study the bar graphs and maps, crosshatched and speckled, that show various facts about the sixty-five-and-older population--their living arrangements, their financial status, their level of education, their racial and ethnic composition.
But the booklets don't answer the questions I'm most interested in. They don't tell me where a person goes when the person he once was isn't there anymore. I don't mean when he dies. I mean when he's disappeared, even though you're looking right at him. They don't say anything about what it's like to outlive your own self.
I have a folder in my filing cabinet labeled "Old Age." I put some of those pamphlets in it, along with articles I clip out of newspapers and magazines and pages I photocopy from books. I even have a series of photographs of my grandfather arranged chronologically so I can see in one sequence the curly hair turn gray and then white, the square shoulders begin to slump and finally to sag, though the eyes are always sharp, even if a little bewildered now behind the cataract glasses. It's a hodgepodge file, hardly scientific. But life, you may have noticed, is at best an inexact science. You don't get to run controlled experiments in a laboratory. You only get one shot at it. And though I know the logical fallacy of the single case, I also know that statistics and graphs alone can't tell me what I want to know. It takes a singular case, a particular case to do that.
When I taught King Lear last year, I discovered that some students were sympathetic with Lear's two wicked daughters Goneril and Regan. From their point of view, Lear should have retired long before he did. He should have been playing golf on the heath instead of trying to regain his kingdom.
"Times change," a sophomore economics major said, shrugging off the Great Chain of Being with two words. "It's inevitable. He should have bowed out gracefully."
How could I argue with that? It's the way we do things today. I know only one thing more than the sophomore: one of these days, the times will change and I won't. I'll stay where I am and the times will move on. And where will I be then? On some iceberg of memory slowly dissolving beneath my feet, leaving me less and less space to stand?
Death is one thing, I know, and there are ways to live with the knowledge of it. Greek immortality, Buddhist damyata, the Christian hope of the Resurrection. But disappearance, dissolution, evaporation? Having no location in the world anymore? Remaining carnal but not incarnated, the body and mind vacant and unrecognizable even to those who have always known you best? Supposing, of course, there is anyone still around who knows you at all. Men must endure their going hence, like Lear, fearing they are not in their perfect mind. Sometimes you go hence, not even knowing what day it is or unable to finish a coherent sentence.
======================
MY GRANDFATHER has seven living children. Nine, if you count the two stepdaughters he hasn't heard from since their mother died. Their own calculations mostly have to do with the immediate future. He's still on his own--or at least my mother and father are able to sustain his illusion of independence for the present. But for how much longer? What if his already imperfect mind should get so unreliable that he could no longer live alone in his house across the field from my parents? What then?
He doesn't live in the same world we live in any longer. He can't negotiate its twist and turns. He lives instead in a little self-contained bubble, like that boy in the newspapers who was allergic to so many things he had to be sheltered from contact with the world, as if he were an alien on the planet. My grandfather has to be sheltered from the present. He lives inside a bubble of memory, a fragment of the past broken off and floating, fragile and constantly threatened, in the current of time.
As long as his memory hold out, the bubble won't burst. Knowing this, I try to take in as many of his memories as I can., hoping that the mere repetition may strengthen them. But my efforts will never be enough to keep that world alive. When he dies, it will die with him. Even now his memory is failing. His world is dying before he does. Not all at one time, in one great rush, but bit by bit, before the death of the body. And a body without memory, without a world--what is it?
Meanwhile, I live stretched between his house and mine, between his world of wood and mine of vinyl. I kept a part of his house because I can't let that life go entirely, either. Between his age and mine there is a crack that runs the entire length of human history. He is going to die, and when he is gone, there won't be anyone like him anymore. We build our lives of different materials now.
The only bridge that can span the crack that separates our lives is memory, and human memory is a fragile strand that cannot bear much weight. The past is the most important place in the world to old people, as it will be to us all some day. It's where we'll live; it's home. All of us want to be at home, and home becomes, eventually, not just a place, but a time.